The Front Office

An author conveys chilliness.

Scratchbomb.com is the sole responsibility of Matthew Callan, who grew up in a place with lots of cops and now resides in Queens. He can be found whining about the Mets on the reg over at Amazin Avenue. He’s been known to write elsewhere, if you’re into that sorta thing. Latest entries into his CV can be found here.

He received an MFA from Brooklyn College, where he got to study with some awesome writers (brag). Stuff he made up has appeared in Beekiller, the Mississippi Review, and Nimrod International Literary Journal, where his completely coincidentally named story “Nimrod” was a finalist for the Katherine Anne Porter Prize. He was also a bridesmaid for fiction contests in Zoetrope: All-Story and Bomb Magazine.

Historic facts! He used to write in fake voices for MSN Sports Filter, your one stop shop for football picks by Wesley Willis. (Don’t bother looking for it; THE MAN shut it down.) He was a contributing writer for the NY Press. (This is where he’d link to one of my articles, but they too have been silenced by the powers that be. Oh, Internet.). He has penned snotty commentaries for NPR and written a lot of stuff for the sadly defunct Freezerbox.com. One of these pieces, “The Lemon Pledge,” was picked by Dave Eggers for the 2003 edition of the Best American Nonrequired Reading, so you know it’s good. Oh, and he contributed to Excelsior You Fathead, a biography of radio humorist Jean Shepherd. So there’s that.

As for the future, right now he is hard at work on a book about the 1999-2000 Mets called Yells for Ourselves, tentative planned for release some time in late 2013 (/vague). You can read all about it here. On the fiction tip, he has also written a novel called Hang a Crooked Number, which is about spies and baseball and many other things. If all goes well, this too will be available for you to read by late 2013, but he shall keep you posted.

And then, one day he’ll die, but then again, so will you. Makes ya think, don’t it?